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All 26,000 of Colorado’s state government employees — excluding public colleges and universities, as well as the state legislature — will be migrated to the system this year, according to a statement Thursday, March 8, from the Governor’s Office of Information Technology.

“We based this decision on the evaluation of cost, security and functionality, as well as an alignment to the administration’s overarching goals and our technology road map,” said Kristin Russell, Colorado’s secretary of technology and chief information officer, in a statement.

The move will save the state approximately $2 million per year, officials said. Colorado currently spends $5.2 million annually for on-premise email used by state employees. Outsourcing email to Google will reduce maintenance costs, the state said. The Office for Information Technology chose Google after testing several products and Google’s email offering has been making further inroads among government customers in recent months because more agencies have decided to move their data into a cloud environment. Google, Microsoft and other email providers are competing fiercely for big government customers as the cloud computing market continues to mature.